Jamaica To say that the past is somehow missing in the Caribbean is not atall the same as saying that the Caribbean has no history, what- ever that could mean. To claim such a thing carries us right back to the heartlands of colonial thinking, In The Middle Passage V. S. Nai- paul polemically —as is his habit — condemned the Caribbean as a place without a history. This is not my view. In fact it seems to me that the burden of history is just too much for its people to bear. 4. Race and Its Disavowal Inthe last chapter my emphasis shifted from my lived experience in Jamaica,to the mental representations of the colonial situation; 1 sought to make sense of my own formation. As I explained, much of this turned on my reflections on how to answer the innocent~or not so innocent — question: ‘Where are you from?’ For all its appar- ent simplicity, it's heavily loaded. I'm reminded of James Baldwin encountering a West Indian at the British Museum in the 1960s, and his heing confronted hy inet thie question “Where are yr from?! Even after Baldwin had set out his origins as clearly as he knew how — ‘I was born in Harlem General Hospital’ - his interlocutor persisted, until he finally posed Baldwin the question: ‘But where ‘were you born before that?’ Precisely! The question can teem with a switl of hidden, perilous pretexts, In order to approximate an answer I needed to say something about how was brought up to understand the waysin which I was inserted in history; and then how I learned to dis identify from this ‘way of seeing, and with what consequences. These are, it’s true, ‘meta questions: less immediately about my life and more about how a life should be narrated. Bur then, as I've said throughout, the distinctions between my life and ideas really have no hold. In recounting the story of someone born out of place, displaced from the dominant currents of history, nothing can be taken for granted. Not least the telling of life. There is one further detour I feel obliged to make before I pick up the story of my journeying from Jamaica to England, en route to Oxford University. I've kept returning to the issue of disavowal, and to the relations between disavowal and race in Jamaica. When I started writing, it was this which I constantly revisited, with an edge of compulsion I'm sure, in my early life the evasions and disa- ‘vowals puzzled me and later caused much grief, What kind of 95Jamaica collective psyche could invest so much energy in maintaining racial dominance and at the same time categorically deny the efficacy of trace? Disavowal is not an uncommon historical phenomenon, espe- cially in matters of race, When I artived in England I encountered these mental reflexes again, but with a different temper from that which I'd been accustomed to. In this short chapter I address this issue. It’s been central to my life, and central too to my intellectual evolution. ‘Frantz Fanon believed that colonial societies worked through race. By this he meant that the social relations of race - which gov- cerned the primal antagonism between settler and native — carried with particular force the weight of colonial authority, imagine that when he wrote in these terms Fanon was thinking more of ‘Algeria than he was of his native Martinique, although we can't be sure, Mnch of whar Thave heen arguing especially shew rhe wave in which the impress of racial subordination left its mark on my family, would appear to bear this out. Yet at the same time the mat- ter of race could seldom be spoken of for what it was, or barely even acknowledged. It was all around, in every respect present, but could never quite be located or articulated. At every turn we encountered manifestations of disavowal, of one kind or another, with their profound, unsettling ambiguities and contradictions. In order to uncover the dynamics of my own Caribbean formation, I feel driven to confront this disjunction which, intangible though it was, ran through daily life. Ineed to grasp, as best I can, the coex- istence of the absolute authority of the racial order on the one hand, and its perpetual disavowal on the other. = Im tracing race in the Caribbean, colour was the joker in the pack. Gail Lewis has explored the complexity of ‘the skin's lan- guage and [its] social validation’. One important aspect of the significance of skin in the Caribbean was the game of hide-and-seek which race and colour played with each other in the postslave social system, into which the stack categories of enslaved Jamaica had evolved over three centuries In this society the consciousnes’ of race and colour operated constantly at @ high pitch” Small dis- tinctions of racial origins and colout, as Well as of wealth and social _ Position, mattered enormously. There existed a social obsession 96 Race and lis Disavowal with what Freud calls ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ In order to locate an individual in a'race/colour system, an optimum solu- tion is to be able to call upari a code of differences which is immediately visible and can be read at a glance. In these circum- stances visibility itself becomes a kind of truth! One needs to be able to map, structure and order what itis that oie/See3) This is achieved by correlating one vector of difference (say, skin colout) against another (say, race). In this strategy of social reading, the position of every individual becomes mappable, and as ic does so it confirms race or colour as the salient determining factor. Afterall, it would never do for someone to be racially misrecognized! Lévi-Strauss calls this way of thinking - this species of mental ‘combinatory’, a sort of living matrix for the purpose of social placing My grandmother an my mather’s side claimed aharaye rn be able to recognize, among those most ambitious to ‘pass’ racially, the telltale signs of what she felicitously called ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ ‘The articulations between race, colour and class underpinned entire social hierarchy. AS Fve explained, virtually white peo- ple, of “local-whites’, clustered at the top of the colonial class pyramid. Below it, the coloured, or more accurately the brown or creole middle and lower-middling strata, formed the intermediary class of the imperial system, the principal conscripts to the colonial order. Atthe bottom were the great mass of overwhelmingly black, poor working-class or peasant Jamaicans, urban and rural, or mov- ing constantly between the two. They occupied a separate social ‘world, Gender cut an independent path through these categories and possessed its own colonial specificity. ‘These articulations Were Specific to a society of this type and created any umber of potential identity-positions. The situation generated a damaging double-split between selfother and here- there. Direct access of the enslaved to their former African cultural sources had been brutally and decisively truncated by conquest : and transplantation into New World slavery.“At the same tite access to anything that might have stood for ‘authentically British’ had been profoundly reconfigured, not only by its transplantation 7Jamaica imo colonial conditions but by its function as part of a system of power and domination. These symbolic repertoires have lefe traces on the palimpsest of the Jamaican culture with which I was familiar as I was entering my adulthood. But none could claim completeness, autonomy or singular authenticity. They were nei- ther intact, self'Sufficient nor autonomous. They had produced ‘what Salman Rushdie once polemically called cultural ‘mongrels. ‘Theit contradictory elements had all been stirred into the colo- nial cookpot and irretrievably creolized. The culture was never again reducible to the sum of its contributory parts. The con- tact zone ~ the ‘third space’, the ‘primal scene’ of their enforced cohabitation ~ turned out to provide the most compelling and _ influential site of change. Ry my rime the elements ofthis indigenizatinn nenease had lang, been fused and condensed into what we simply took for granted as the basis of Jamaican popular life. This I've called the ‘Jamaican vernacular’. Those acute observers of Jamaican history, Tom Holt and Erna Brodber, in their different registers, both refer to the out ‘come as simply ‘Afro-Jamaica’. Jamaica's modern history, whatever might now be its myths of origin, began there. Ic follows that authenticity of origins in this field, as much as any other, is problematic. Little of the original cultures survived; their ‘bearers succumbed to the harsh labour regimes imposed on them. None of those who followed were native to the region; they all came from somewhere else. This may be the source of confusion in | that other contested term — hybridity ~ which has been used to describe Caribbean culture. Fybridity, although it catches some aspects, can also be a confusing way of referencing the society's diverse beginnings, its ‘after-the-event’ character. Hybridity too often seems to attribute entanglement to mixed blood rather than to the play of historical and cultural factors. For my liking, it’s too _ close to a form of biological reductionism. = “From thé f93os in Jamaica, more or less from the time of my birth, the inherited racial order began to fracture, its social power loosening — as was signified partly by 1938 and its allied transforma. tions. One way of plotting this is to trace how the term ‘black’ 98 Race and Its Disavowal entered the public lexicon, and how it became an impetus in the collective endeavour to reimagine how the self could be recast. The long and complex story of Garveyism, crucially, is importantin this context, representing a new, emergent, symbolic formation of great power. But where this break becomes most visible is in the moment, of what has been called secondary decolonization, in the late 1960s, in the Pan-Caribbean moment of Black Power, {In my youth, as I've said, the term black was certainly not used as. selfdescription by the middle classes. Coloured was much pre- feired. Black was Considered too impolite to use even about those who were, in an obvious sense, black. I never thought of myself as, black then, although I knew I didn’t belong where I was. And none of my friends would have called me, or themselves, black. Yer the wor ellinihig siaajollty of Uk J their racialized inferiorization, from the humiliating encounters of daily life to the way that society had been organized by its racial hierarchies. They knew intimately the depth of the prejudice, in some cases visceral, which white and coloured people felt towards them. However, blackness had hot yet become a positive term to be claimed, or a leading category for group identification, or for collec- (tive political organization — although this was changing fast, especially among the emerging Pan-African minority. The idea of blackness had been remorselessly stereotyped and degraded; fears of blackness were embedded in the taken-for-granteds of common sense, its negativity reinforced by unconscious, hostile feelings, complicated by unresolved psychic knots and defences which were - ungPeakable even when fully knowable. All this is whatis meant by saying what otherwise seems improbable: that Jamaica did not + really think itself a black society until the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 19705, It wasn’t until that period, after major historic challenges to the existing racial order, that this taboo was broken. It was not only a Caribbean matter, but a global one. A new historical epoch was inaugurated by decolonization and by the emergence of new non-white ~ ‘non-aligned’ —nations, encompassing Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States; Garveyism in the Caribbean panes ealy unhisionnl 99.Jamaica G@lthough not only in the Caribbean), combining with Rastafarian- ism and reggae; the long struggle against apartheid; the black British ‘culture wars’ and the mobilization of anti-racist movements in the 19708, And much more.‘In the aftermath of the 19605 the~ ‘word black acquired its positive contemporary connotations, and profoundly transformed the possibilities for popular life. ‘These ruptures in meaning, and the creation of new black identities, became visible day by day in alternative, cultural modes such as music, street styles and dance, where new ways of expression could be voiced, embodied and performed. ‘Through Rastafarianism and reggae Jamaica played a disproportionate role in this global reimag- ining of what racial emancipation might promise. As I've sought to explain, for my generation of brown, middle- tise Jamaians repacssion conccabiad aut ghrgua alain, occas out the glaringly obvious which (in turn) demanded to be heard, and was — for this very reason — unsayable. The essence 6f disa-) yowal is precisely to know and to notknow at one andthe same time, Foucault argues that, far from successfully repressing what is unspeakable, prohibition actually generates productive linguistic proliferation, which paradoxically signals the ultimate failure of repression. Prohibited from saying more, he suggests, we find other ‘ways - more indirect, more displaced, but also simultaneously more insistent ~ of, well, saying it. Thus for Foucault the repressive aspects of Victorian sexual morality had the effect of stimulating a great avalanche of new kinds of erotic writing, pornography and ‘talk, precisely about that deemed unspeakable, sex. Jamaica was a case not of repression as such, but of a collective psychic disavowal. Censored from speaking about the troubling existence of race, Jamaica — the middle classes especially — produced in that absent/ present space not just a plethora of talk, but a thousand euphe- misms, evasions and circumlocutions. The more society tried to avoid it, the more expansive and refined the terminology became, and the more effectively it opened the door for the racial uncon- scious to enter the social language. Catherine, in her study of Lord Macaulay, has argued that in colonial discourse this forgetting is a form of ‘racialization without race’. 100 Race and hts Disavowal Ie may be useful, in this regard, to hold in mind the contrasts ‘between the operations of race in the Caribbean and in the United ‘States. In Jamaica whites constituted a small minority, greatly ontnum- ered by the black enslaved and freed slaves. In most of the North American slave states whites outnumbered blacks, who consequently ~ as Brodber and others have argued — were attempt- ing to make a space for themselves inside 2 dominant white world. In Jamaica, by contrast, and in the Caribbean more gener- ally, ideas of freedom increasingly turned to forging a space elsewhere or outside, as exemplified in the growing imaginative identification with Africa In the US the racial gradients were much steeper and supposedly ioe of white and Wook blood in each person's veins: quadroon, octoroon and so on. Racial differences were thus both more sharply defined legally and more heavily enforced socially in the Deep South than they ever were in the Caribbean. The Civil War, for all its promise, only weakly and temporarily loosened these racial divisions. Reconstruction, an ambiguous attempt by the North to introduce a new social regime in the South, was speedily compromised by the wave of hucksters and carpetbaggers who led the way. States acquired the right to draft their own legislation on the liberties and limits of freed blacks. Organized opposition to racial emancipation soon came to be evi- dent in the efforts to introduce Jim Crow legislation, which hardened and formalized the lines of racial discrimination, creat- ing, in effect, a new colourdine. An extremist section ~ the Klan— reached for its white hoods and ropes. In effect, the social apartheid of the plantation era was recreated in post-Abolition conditions. In Jamaica no such racial edifice existed and the colourline was less strictly institutionalized, working not by law but by custom and habit. One need only think, in the Caribbean situation, of the exclusive white enclaves represented by the yacht clubs, where no prohibitions reign. But where, also, there is no need for them. They simply are, habitually, white. In practice, race was sliding signifierJamaica in Jamaica.-The social slippage ~ the sliding of the signifier ~ was extensive, constitutive of social life itself. There were wide skin col- oir variations even within the same family, as was the case in my own, Jamaican society gossiped, monitored intensely and specu- lated riotously about this perpetual, confusing fluidity of the body. ‘When I was child its what Jamaica was. Such 2 social system requires that we think not only about the relations which sustain it but also how, day by day, itis reproduced. ‘Thisin turn takes us to questions of gendered bodies, of sexualities, and of the manifold transactions between variant ‘epidermal sche- \, mas’ on the one hand, and erotic desire on the other. Ir brings us to \ the conjunction of race and sexuality. I've alluded to this when I've "discussed my family situation: my fate as a dark) brown-skinned, Scales buy, aiid the powerful proseine of aay snuchcs. S. Lewis draws on the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion to speculate about the nature of ‘maternal reveries’ and goes on to propose that skin itself can act as the mysterious carrier of ‘secrets and desire and knowledge. ’ The disavowal of those deemed the most socially abject is not exclusively a racial, or a colour, matter. It runs through the social. relations of class, gender, sexuality and intimacy. In contempo- rary Jamaica the weight of the historical past, in this respect, is immediate. The violence meted out to queer men, to take the most prominent example, bears this out. In earlier times, among the respectable, the circumlocution was pronounced, It wasn't as if respectable society didn't talk about homosexuality; it was a con- stant refrain, even while it could never be spoken ‘as it was’. It was ever present as a dark undercurrent. Today race, sex and power make a dynamic erotic cocktail. The nightmare for white men seems to be that black men might outdo them in sexual size or per- formance and displace them in the eyes of white women. The fears of being overmastered by an insurgent sexual ‘below’ provided the ingredients for a powerful white fantasy. In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon observes that whites often imagine that black men have penises ‘the size of cathedrals’ In reaction to such prevalent fantasies, an exaggerated black masculinity has become one of the Race and Its Disavowal terrains where stolen freedoms are contested and compensated for, where historic struggles are symbolically played out. This deep, troubled vein of male chauvinism in Jamaican society, matched by a correlative homophobia, is a disfiguring contemporary legacy of the racial past. The casual violence to women is another. Sexual prowess is one way for black mén to affirm the masculine self in a world of dependencies, one of the few spheres of freedom and power that have not been abrogated. For significant numbers of black women in contemporary popu- lar culture sexuality, too, has become a highly charged theatre in which to claim and perform their independence, especially with regard to sexual pleasure, These elements figure strongly in the ‘slackness’ urban culture today, in which both men and women black British men in the diaspora are prototypically described as having irresponsibly fathered children with different ‘baby moth- is another distant relation of the same ideological trope. However, always, at che other end of this chain of phantastuatic desires are those who are the objects and victims of the process ~ especially women and gay men. ‘This is to say that race/colour really does work as the principle of articulation across the society as a whole: as the means by which multiple forms of oppression interconnect and take on meaning. Race,-whatever it may signify, cannot be seen except through its’ appearances, while skin colour is only too visibie So itis tempting to use one to stand irl for ~ to represent — the other, ~_Of the two terms=race and colour £ race Was and is the primordial ‘category. Icused to be assumed that racial difference was transmit- ‘ted biologically and genetically. Indeed, Skip Gates long ago argued that race became ‘a trope of irreducible difference between cul- tures, linguistic groups or adherents of specific belief systems which — more often than not ~ also have fundamentally opposed economic interests’, The problem which follows is that racial trans- faission is not visible to the naked eye. It’s thus difficult to build a ( common-sense distinction — an everyday social language ~ around genetic differences if they don't have visible, obvious and easily ers’ 103Jamaica available referents. Skin colour, on the other hand, is only too immediately visible. Its visibility was, and is, its greatest discursive value. It facilitates instant recognition. Visibility thus becomes the synonym for truth. To borrow from Jacqueline Rose’s wonderful ‘book Sexuality in the Field of Vision, these manoeuvres locate race in ‘the field of vision’. Thus the substitution of colour for race pro- vided a readable code within which one term could be substituted for the other. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe call this structure of thinking a ‘system of equivalence’. discursive system, biological race was the primary cate- gory of difference. But colour was the most obvious visual boundary marker. It enabled us to apprehend processes that could not be seen with the naked eye, but which we knew were at work invisibly ody, richie # equivalences are of the Geet émportanss: not, as its critics put it, because it's “just a matter of language’, but because such discursive systems shape and govern social practices and vice versa ‘The process of social mapping included the stereotyping not just of blood, but also-of cultural characteristics. In colonial discourse, non-white peoples were regularly categorized as congenitally lazy, unreliable, aggressive, over-emotional, oversexed, irrational, not ‘well endowed intellectually and thus destined by nature to be for ever low down on the scale of civilized societies. When the trade in slaves was under way, and when eventually the slaves’ basic human- ity came grudgingly to be acknowledged, they were most commonly as belonging to the Negro race, understood as an alto- peti separate and lower order of human beings permanently \confined to an inferior stage of social development. Cultural stereo- types could then be thought of as like colour: fixed and immovable __because ~ apparently - derived not from history, but from nature, "Another way of putting this was that racial cultural characteristics change, if at all, only at the glacial speed of natural evolution. In everyday life they are experienced as permanent, secured and eter- 1d thus not subject to reform or change. = The effect of this was to fix, natufalize and normalize racial dift “ference, wanslating. physical appearance into social meaning“In 104 Race and its Disavowal Mythologies Roland Barthes mobilized such an argument in his dis- cussion of the image of the black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris Match. He called the ideological process involved aruralization, the practice of reducing history vo nature. In so arthes was following an observation by Marx about the means by which bourgeois ideology normalizes the workings of the capitalist market, making it appear to be an economic system authorized by nature itself, “The term naturalization also brings to mind Fanon, who calls a system of racialized social distinction organized around skin col- cour an epidermal schema’. From this perspective, the body becomes a thing to ‘think difference with’, as well as something which immediately triggers anxiety and fear. ‘Tiens, Mama! Un négre!’, the ALL seclaimns ie Bonon'e Frmane canditinn Tw theca Fors wre, much of the menace of race is condensed. And as Fanon demon- strated through such seemingly inconsequential practices, white fear of black itself becomes normalized. It was teasing out this ‘system of articulation’ which led me to pose the question, in my opening lecture for the DuBois Center for ‘African-American Scudies at Harvard, ‘Is Race Nothing but a Float ing Signifier” My short answer was that race is boti a socio-economic “fact’ and a social construct or a discursive ‘event’ — although never, ‘of course, the sign of a fixed, proven, objective scientific law operat- ‘ing outside discourse and as such a warrant for its own validity. ‘The importance of race/colour as a discursive signifier in the organization 6f social meaning didn’t imply (as the sceptics sup- } posed) that discourse didn’t matter in (as they say) ‘the real world’ because it was ‘only language’. Discourse and practice are not fun- damentally opposed., Practices always have a meaning, and: ‘meanings organize practice and produce real effects. Within a sys- “fem of representation of this kind, I argued, explaining racism doesn't require that we make a principled, analytic choice between physical and cultural factors. Rather, the two became, as I put it then, ‘tacism’s two registers’ ‘The process of decolonization in Jamaica had to engage with the home culture on many different fronts. It was crucial to bring to 105Jamaica the forefront of conscious thought and language what had been perpetually disavowed. This offers one way of understanding the recurring dynamic of the cultural revolutions of the late 1960s and the 19708, which promised to liberate us from the social habits of dlisavowal that had underwritten the workings of modern Jamaica ‘When I was growing up this was yet to be. No such collective willexisted, outside the various undercurrents ofthat other Jamaica which could barely be known to people of my class and colour. ‘This resulted in an unnerving, debilitating experience: to feel that there was no available language with which to understand what \_was most urgent and deep inside every one of us. The journey away. from Jamaica also had to become the journey to something new, which would allow us to speak what was in us. PART IL Leaving Jamaica